The weblog of Norman Geras

January 08, 2013

The third party living in our house

Sometimes it helps to adjust the angle of vision so that you can look at a seemingly familiar issue differently.

If I were to tell you that, along with me and WotN, there was another... well, being living in our house and you were to ask me to tell you more, how would you react if I said that I couldn't tell you any more about this being? It was fundamentally unknowable, and so I couldn't say anything about its nature. In fact it wasn't a comprehensible entity, neither for me nor for WotN nor for anybody. All I could tell you, therefore, was that I was in a condition of non-knowing where the other resident of our house was concerned. As well as not being comprehensible, it was immeasurable, unattainable and unfathomable. Still, that being our relation to this being, WotN and I had uncovered an oasis of calmness and peace.

Might you not be sceptical about whether there really was another being living with WotN and me in our house? I reckon you'd have grounds for scepticism. But this is just what David Bryant is giving out on Comment is Free about God.

Addendum (at 3.30 pm): There was a further point I had intended, when beginning this post, to deal with, and then forgot to. I make good the oversight now. For all his emphasis on the unknowability (unfathomability, immeasurability, etc) of God, David Bryant does willy-nilly appear to know some things about Him - like that He is, speaking symbolically, very big and significant, and conducive to calmness, peace and immense rewards. This is having it both ways. God is either knowable or not knowable and if He isn't, then where does all the above significance come from? Why not reckon with the possibility of this unknowable entity being very small and not mattering a jot? My hypothesis is that, forswearing knowledge of God, Bryant continues to trade on some of what is thought to be known about Him by those according to whom some knowledge of Him is attainable.